Book Review: Tears,Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages: Niobe’s Siblings by Norbert Lennartz

There is, perhaps, nothing more universally human than our excretions. Norbert Lennartz's Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages provides an expansive dive into ways canonical literary greats have deployed liquidity to various ends. The study argues that bodily fluids, as well as the holes that expel and absorb them, are ‘deeply embedded in European narratives of gender, body and anthropology’ (p. 2). Narratives of ooziness and porosity spread their way through European literature, at times reminding readers of shared humanity and at times—indeed, most of the time—used to demarcate genders and concretise norms. Niobe, a European mythological figure who was doomed to eternally lament the loss of her children as a weeping statue, serves as a guide through the ages. Following the ebb and flow of the ‘Niobean’ in literature, Lennartz provides a fascinating, hyper-focused close re-reading of a host of canonical texts spanning roughly three hundred years.

The book is organised chronologically, with each chapter tackling roughly a literary age, but Lennartz does not allow the concept of linear temporality to solidify the form of the text. Instead, authors, characters and motifs from more contemporary ages penetrate early chapters while others re-emerge in later chapters to enrich and expand the reading of porosity and petrification. This creates a cumulative effect that is less like regurgitation and more like accretion, in the Sedgwickian sense that accretion allows for an open and reparative engagement with texts that might otherwise seem predictable or played out. ¹ Lennartz calls this intertextual strategy ‘critical porosity’ (p. 18).

Chapter One reads the gendered and sexualised implications of tears and other excretions from Shakespeare to the Metaphysical poets and the Cavaliers and finally in the Earl of Rochester and Jonathan Swift. This chapter convincingly puts the texts in conversation with scientific and medical developments regarding the body and its various holes, interweaving close reading with prevailing theories of sexed and gendered bodies as well as the social norms and expectations around leakiness. Chapter Two tackles Romanticism, beginning with the conflation of tears, ink and genital fluids in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). From there the chapter turns to the more overtly pornographic and porous with a discussion of John Cleland's Fanny Hill (1748) and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), before exploring the tension between Wordsworth's masculine stoniness and the various treatment of effusion by Coleridge, Keats and Byron. Chapter Three covers the Victorian age and its near obsession with concealing any trace of women's porousness while celebrating men's solidity. The chapter begins with a reading of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) as a narrative of both temptation and ‘sexual weaning’ through the exchange of juices (p. 132). Moving to Jane Eyre (1847) and David Copperfield (1850), Lennartz outlines the Victorian bildungsroman's concern with tracing the protagonist's increasing self-enclosure. This chapter also provides a brief discussion of the socio-historical significance of Victorian marriage beds, or ‘marital mausoleums’, as austere spaces of self-containment and protection from polluting fluids (p. 144). Tracing the metaphoric function of fluids such as breast milk, juice and blood in novels such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895), Dracula (1897) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Lennartz's scope at times seems to undermine a depth of analysis that any one of these texts might engender if given more sustained attention. Chapter Four achieves a more measured pace with an extended close reading of the ‘abdominal’ preoccupations and carnivalesque gender transgressions of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Like Joyce, D.H. Lawrence also rails against the petrification of the Victorian age but Lennartz points out that in novels such as Sons and Lovers (1913) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence poses a battle between porosity and stoniness that more universally ‘cut[s] across sexes, genders and classes’ (p. 212). Chapter Five serves as a kind of coda with some brief reflections on the increasing sterilisation exhibited in post-war literature. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) highlights the ongoing lineage of Victorian bodily negation and Lennartz extends this reading to posit the post-war urge to smooth, conceal and even photoshop nude bodies into poreless automatons. The chapter concludes with two twenty-first century texts, the graphic novel NIOBE: She is Life (2015) by Amandla Stenberg and Sebastian A. Jones and Guido Argentini's silver photo series.

It seems hard to believe that with its three-hundred-year span, this text gives attention to only a single text authored by a Black person or with a person of colour as its central character. It does seem to be the case that the one paragraph dedicated to NIOBE: She is Life is indeed the book's only explicit reading of the anti-Black implications around porosity. This treatment of race is symptomatic of a major shortcoming of the text—its tendency to take the canon at face value. In other words, Lennartz investigates gender through the lens of porosity and petrification but the analysis is constrained by the binary conception of gender imagined by the canonical writers themselves. Though Lennartz claims to read against-the-grain, the close readings are decidedly normative in this respect. One might counter that it is anachronistic to approach these texts using contemporary theories of gender, sexuality, race and class. Lennartz, however, does display a contemporary feminist theoretical orientation with consistent attention to the misogynist implications of the treatment of fluidity but lacks acknowledgement of the transphobic or racist implications. Even when explicitly analysing gender transgression, Lennartz does so in a way that reinforces binary gender by positing gender non-conformity as ‘hermaphroditic’ or as a kind of carnivalesque role reversal. Further, terms such as ‘transsexualization’ and ‘transgendering’ are used as metaphorical abstractions and therefore do not account for the existence of gender expansiveness in the texts, the relationship of gender and sexuality to the racialised imperialist project or the material implications of transphobic literary tropes. Further, the complexities of sexuality are generally disavowed, with terms such as ‘homoerotic’ and ‘homosocial’ sprinkled throughout—at times seemingly interchangeably—without sustained critical attention. While there are a few passing mentions of queer theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Michel Foucault, the book would have benefited from a more meaningful engagement with queer, queer of colour, transgender and postcolonial theories and reading practices.

The scope of Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages is truly impressive. It pays unflinching attention to the liquid grotesque in the canon and provides an explicit treatment of the body and its leakiness without resorting to ‘metaphorical fig leaves’ or the stony limitations of chronology. While the expansive time frame and canonical orientation mean that Lennartz's book lacks some depth of analysis at times and misses opportunities to truly read against-the-grain, it stages an enjoyable and sweeping journey through the literary ages with Niobe as a guide.